Santa Claus Beats Jesus in 2010 Christmas Day Google Search

Cross-posted from Technology Logs
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It’s Christmas day for most part of the world today and so is here in the Philippines. Crowded shopping malls, traffic roads, lanterns and Christmas lights are common sign of the busy holiday. In addition, Christmas carols are in every radio stations and music players.

Since, Christmas is claimed to be a celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth, I conducted a little test to see how people do in the internet. I would like to know how internet people think in this season. I used Google Trends, a popular web stat tool that tracks down search terms inputs in Google around the world.

The result is not what most of us would expect. My expectation is that the search terms would be more like Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus and Mary or anything related to Jesus’ birth. Ironically, Google Trends shows that Santa Claus is the king of Christmas search. From the Google Trends’ data, the term “where is santa claus” is the hottest topic for the season and “norad santa tracker” is the hottest search term. The term "Jesus" is not even in the list.

Google Trends. Screenshot taken December 25, 2010

Funny isn’t it? Is the world losing what Christmas Day is supposed to be for?